74 THE QUESTION OF PALESTINE essentially constitutive activity, which had the force, the prestige, and the authority o f science. M oreover, because in such fields as biology, philology, and geology the scientific consciousness was principally a reconstituting, restoring, and transforming activity turning old fields into new ones, the link between an outright imperialist attitude toward distant lands in the Orient and a scientific attitude to the “ inequalities" o f race was that both attitudes depended on the European will, on the determining force necessary to change confusing or useless realities into an orderly, disciplined set o f new classifications useful to Europe. Thus in the works o f Carolus Linnaeus, G eorges Buffon, and G eorges Cuvier the white races became scientifically different from reds, yellows, blacks, and browns, and, consequently, territories occupied by those races also newly became vacant, open to Western colonies, develop­ ments, plantations, and settlers. Additionally, the less equal races were made useful by being turned into what the white race studied and came to understand as a part o f its racial and cultural hegemony (as in Joseph deG obineau and Oswald Spengler); or, following the impulse o f outright colonialism, these lesser races were put to direct use in the empire. When in 1918, G eorges Clem enceau stated that he believed he had “ an unlimited right o f levying black troops to assist in the defense o f French territory in Europe if France were attacked in the future by G erm an y," he was saying that by some scientific right France had the knowledge and the power to convert blacks into what Raymond Poincar6 called an econom ic form of gunfodder for the white Frenchm an.'1 Imperialism, o f course, cannot be blamed on science, but what needs to be seen is the relative ease with which science could be deform ed into a rationalization for imperial domination. Supporting the taxonom y o f a natural history deformed into a social anthropology whose real purpose was social control, was the taxonomy o f linguistics. With the discovery o f a structural affinity between groups or families o f languages by such linguists as Franz Bopp, William Jones, and Friedrich von Schlegel, there began as well the unwarranted extension o f an idea about language families into theories o f human types